Without Durant, this Horford deal is garbage. $113M for a declining 30 year old? Ugh. C'mon, Durant.
There's always one!
Nah...it's not like that. It's going to take a while to get used to the new tv deal with a lot of money floating around and stuff. I was thinking in terms of the "old system." Considered Evan turner got 70M, yea, Horford's deal is ok I guess.
That doesn't matter. Ignore the number and ask yourself whether Horford would have been worth a max contract under the old cap. It's the same thing.
Under old cap, no. He's not worth a max in my opinion.
So you should undoubtedly be aware that both under the new and the old cap, max contracts are defined as a percentage of max team salary, right? If he wasn't worth max under the old cap, he probably isn't worth max under the new one, too.
Honestly, I don't think it's that simple. I don't think a max contract now is comparable to a max contract under the old cap.
Reason is that under the old cap, there would have been only a handful of teams in the NBA - probably four or five at most - who would have had the cap space to offer a max contract. Most of those would be teams who had a lack of talent (as the teams with good players usually don't have cap space), so that forces quality players to make the choice - "Do I take the money and go to a potentially weaker team, or do I sacrifice some coin so that I can go to a team that can win?".
The difference is that right now, because of the way the cap jumped, pretty much EVERY team in the NBA has the cap space to sign a max contract player. That means that a guy like Horford who is looking for a big payday has the luxury of going to a winning team AND getting the max as well.
It also means guys like Mozgov can pull off a $17M deal because so many teams have cap space that if the Lakers DIDN'T offer him that, some other team probably will.
Everybody wants to get better, so everybody wants to add talent. There are only so many legit stars on the free agent market - Howard, Horford, Durant - maybe Conley at a squeeze. Once those guys are off the market, you end up a giant bidding war, with the next 20-25 teams sitting around with tons of money in their account, trying to work out who is the best guy to spend it on. It's not a matter of "do we spend it?" - it's a question of "who do we spend it on?".
Mediocre guys are going to get big paydays. Guys like Horford, who might have considered settling for less then a max deal a year or two ago, now have no reason to settle for anything less.